Finished Roy R. Manstan and Frederic L. Frese’s Turtle: David Bushnell’s Revolutionary Vessel about the Revolutionary war submersible. They did an excellent job of researching the vehicle, finding precedents and sources, and building a working replica (the second such for one of them). I hadn’t realized:
1.) That Bushnell never called it “The Turtle” himself
2.) That it ran two more missions after the unsuccessful attack on the Eagle
3.) That they originally intended to plant charges on three ships in one night, with the mechanical detonators set to let them explode simultaneously.
There was a LOT more engineering involved than I realized – Bushnell had to invent an array of devices and techniques to make his craft function. That it did so well, despite the failure of its mission, is impressive. Bushnell went on to make underwater mines, as well.
Almost finished with In the Peanut Gallery with Mystery Science Theater 3000 , a collection of essays edited by Robert G. Weiner and Shelley E. Barba. There are a lot of interesting tidbits in the book, but it seems intellectually top-heavy, dragging in sociologists and expert papers as if they’re discussing Freud instead of an independent show carving up B-movies. I’d say that the book itself was a prime target for riffing by the MST3K crew, were it not for the fact that Kevin Murphy contributed a foreword and Mary Jo Pehl an afterword. Predictably, each of the contributors dredges up precursors to the MST3K bunch (and there were plenty of them. I myself used to host “Bad Film Festivals” years before MST3K aired) – Woody Allen’s What’s up, Tiger Lily?, It Came from Hollywood, etc. But it was Murphy who brought up one of the earliest examples of “riffing” in pop culture – the court at Athens commenting on the "mechanicals’ play of “Pyramus and Thisbe” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. No one seems to mention another early example, the riffing on “Hamlet” in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, something I only know about because I’m reading it on audio (see below). They also don’t give enough credit to earlier “Horror hosts” – Zacherley (John Zacherle), for instance, didn’t just appear at the station breaks in the movie, but also frequently cut himself into scenes in the movies. He also put together a collection of scenes from movies – with his own skits and commentary – and released it as Zacherley’s Horrible Horror. It can stand beside It Came from Hollywood as a bible of Bad Cinema.
I’m working my way through The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack on Kindle as bedside reading. Although I['ve read all the LOvecraft and Howard in the set, there are a lot of pieces in the collection that I have not read, including classics like “The Hounds of Tindalos”. Still working my way through, about 2/3 of the way now.
On Audio I listened to Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell by Tim Miller, Republican political consultant and writer. There’s a lot at the beginning about him coming to terms with being gay, especially in his chosen milieu of Republican politics, and I was afraid at first that this was going to be a book about just that, but he eventually settled into politics, giving a recent history of Republican presidential politics and Trump in particular. He does a good job of conveying the mindset that one strives to push the party line as a matter of pride and professionalism, even if it can potentially hurt you. A real footsoldier in the party is supposed to be indifferent to that sort of thing, and that’s how Miller himself justified supporting all those politicians who hated gays. (Miller himself was involved in producing the 2012 “post mortem” that said that, to win the votes of women, minorities, and gays, the party needed to be more welcoming to those groups. That was before the party effectively said “Fuck that!” and doubled down on racism and xenophobia.)
Not surprisingly, the answer to “why they did that” – followed Trump off the Edge of the Cliff into the Abyss – was because of the same professionalism even in the face of hurting yourself. Besides, if they left the party over such issues, where were they going to go? More surprising to me was Miller’s essentially confirming what Bill Maher said a week ago on his show – supporting and voting for candidates that might be seen as vile and objectionable by others is STILL preferable to being seen as supporting the Democrats and their policies. Even if the politicians appear dysfunctional and reprehensible. They’re signaling that even such choices are preferable to the excesses of the Democrats. I would have thought that such a response could flare up on the spur of a moment, but not that it could be maintained through an entire political campaign, and that the downside wouldn’t outlast a single session of serious consideration. But evidently I’m wrong. “Owning the Libs” trumps rationality.
I’m now listening to Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. I either love Dickens or I hate him. There’s no rhyme to reason to this. I love A Christmas Carol, but I hated all his other Christmas novels. I like A Tale of Two Cities and, I’ve learned, Oliver Twist, but I couldn’t get into The Pickwick Papers (his earliest success) or Hard Times (a much later work). I suspect I’ll like David Copperfield when I one day get around to it. I’ve liked the adaptations I’ve seen. So far, I’m liking Great Expectations. I knew the story, because I had read the Classics Illustrated edition of it. (And I was lucky to stumble across a used copy of it. That particular title had been out of print since 1948, although it has since been revived by two recent incarnations of the CI brand). That’s a bit of a pity, because there’s a moderately clever twist 2/3 of the way through the book that really would have given me a jolt, had I not known about it.
Dickens seems t anticipate our pop culture idea of the Vampire. I know that the vampire had already planted its claws in us with Polidori’s The Vampyre and the many adaptations of it (mostly fueled by the mistaken belief that Lord Byron had written it), and by the Penny Dreadful Varney the Vampire. So when Dickens has Scrooge say that anyone who says “Merry Christmas” “Ought to be boiled in his own plum pudding and buried with a stake of holly in his heart,” he is probably co-opting vampire lore. But his Miss Havisham, who lives a timeless, sunless existence in a shut-up house filled with old and decaying things and the shades drawn, and who he says might explode if sunlight touched her, seems a perfect vampire, even though that business about being destroyed by sunlight wouldn’t be applied to vampires until many decades later.
